John Peter Helphinstine married Mary Paden on Sept. 3, 1840, in Madison County, Kentucky.

Madison County, Kentucky is tinted white in this 1835 map

In 1852 their family traveled overland to California by wagon. Their daughter Margaret was only 9 years old during the journey. After many difficulties they arrived safely in Sacramento on August 27, 1852. A short time later the Helphinstines sailed up the Sacramento River to the wilderness outpost now called Princeton, in old Colusi County. Today Princeton is located in Colusa County.

By the spring of 1852, the first hotels had been built along the Old Shasta Road, which went up the west side of the Sacramento River. "Like everybody else who settled along the road at that date he kept a hotel ...". J. P. J. Helphinstine took over a hotel called the Sixteen-Mile House from J. M. Arnett. It was located in Princeton. John's brother Lewis Harrison Helphinstine kept the Ten Mile House, located three miles below Princeton. Later they both became farmers.

Their daughter Margaret married John Jackson Waste in 1858 in Princeton when she was 15. When she was 17, she gave birth to a daughter named Maggie but died two days later. "Our daughter Margaret was married in '58 and died in '60, leaving us a little girl two days old," explained Mary Padan Helphinstine in a note many years ago. "The child lived until she was 3 years and 3 months old . . . leaving us old people alone!"

On July 13, 1862, a fire occurred at Princeton, on the farm of John Helphinstine, in which his barn, stables and seventy-five tons of hay were destroyed, inflicting a loss of $2,000.

Their son James died on Dec. 20, 1863 at the age of 22. He was buried next to his sister Margaret and little Maggie.

In 1864, also in Princeton, their widowed son-in-law, J. J. Waste remarried, this time to a cousin of Margaret's named Mary Catherine McIntosh. Their first child, Nina, died when she was only two. Their second child, William Harrison Waste, was born on Oct. 31, 1868. Mary died on Dec. 5, 1868 at age 24, only five weeks after William's birth. In accordance with Mary's deathbed request, young William was taken to live with his Uncle John and Aunt Mary Helphinstine, who had since moved to nearby Chico, across the Sacramento River in Butte County.

This image was passed down through the years to my father. It dates from the 1877. John became a farmer in the Rock Creek area a few miles north of Chico. This scene shows his farm there.